Майкл Ридпат - Fatal Error

Dcomsult, the new firm of consultants we had brought in to implement the system, knew about this, and they didn’t like it. But Owen insisted. Guy and I picked up that there were some problems between Owen and Dcomsult, but we assumed this was just another result of Owen’s notorious ability to infuriate anyone he worked with. Guy gave him the benefit of the doubt and I wanted to have as little to do with him as possible.

Two days before the site launch we did a dummy run, bombarding the system with fictional requests for clothing. It worked like a dream. And the on-line catalogue looked really good.

The launch day came. We had spent plenty of money announcing it at a time of year when advertising is at its most expensive. The press were warmed up, indeed the fashion editor of one of the biggest middle-market newspapers was planning to make some purchases. Her article would be a terrific way to reach the women who were thinking of Christmas presents for their football-mad boyfriends or husbands.

We went live at ten o’clock in the morning. The hits began immediately. Traffic rose strongly. People started ordering. The system didn’t crash. By five o’clock it had been operating without a hitch for seven hours, so we all trooped out to Smiths, a cavernous warehouse-cum-bar opposite the Smithfield meat market that was developing a useful franchise as the watering hole for the internet businesses in the area. Guy ordered champagne. After an hour or so I went home, leaving some of the others to return to the office to check the system.

I came in the next morning slightly late to be met by mayhem. Amy, Owen, Sanjay, Guy and the people from Dcomsult had been there all night. The batch file that was sent to our distributor with all the information on the day’s purchases had been corrupted. That meant that the distributor couldn’t be confident of what goods to ship to whom. Amy seemed to be having great difficulty getting to the bottom of exactly how it had been corrupted. Owen seemed to know, but said he was too busy to explain and forbade Sanjay from doing anything but try to unravel the problem.

More orders were coming in. We couldn’t handle them. At ten o’clock Guy pulled a group of us together. He asked Owen whether he could guarantee that the problem would be solved in the next hour. Owen said he couldn’t. So Guy gave the command to shut down the e-commerce section of the site.

Amy called the fashion editor to ask her what she had ordered and to promise her that it would be delivered to her immediately. The fashion editor was unimpressed, although she spotted her opportunity. The next day, ninetyminutes.com hit the front page for the first time. ‘Don’t trust the Internet for your Christmas shopping’ was the message. Just the kind of publicity we needed. Even worse, we were making the whole industry look bad.

By working all day and long into the following night we managed to piece together manually who had ordered what and to send this information to our distributor’s warehouse by motor bike. The goods were shipped. But our credibility had suffered enormous, possibly irreparable, harm.

It wasn’t just our credibility. Amy had tried to keep our product line as simple as possible, but we had had to order substantial quantities of clothing from our manufacturers. Clothing that would have to be paid for. If we couldn’t sell most of it before Christmas, we would take a big financial hit.

It took Guy to pinpoint what had happened. The fault was in the API Owen had written. There were lots of told-you-sos from Dcomsult. Owen blamed them for not anticipating what he was going to do. Guy tried to put a lid on the recriminations and make everyone concentrate on getting the site on-line again. It was a difficult task. Owen was not prepared to admit he was wrong.

Eventually Dcomsult insisted on a meeting. We were sitting round a table: two of them, Guy, me, Amy, Ingrid and Owen. The leader of the Dcomsult team was a Yorkshireman called Trevor. He was squat, compact, with a permanently intense expression. You could tell he was a techie, because he spoke rapidly, but he was articulate and what he said was clear and understandable.

‘We have identified the problem with the system,’ he began. ‘It’s with the API that modifies our product catalogue.’

‘The problem’s with your e-commerce package, not the API,’ interrupted Owen.

Trevor writhed in frustration.

Guy held up his hand. ‘Just a moment, Owen. I want to hear what Trevor has to say, then we’ll hear from you.’

Owen growled, his small eyes gleaming.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ said Trevor. ‘The API is ingenious. And if we could integrate it with the rest of the solution it could be very powerful. But that’s going to take time. And that’s basically our choice.’

‘Go on,’ said Guy.

‘We have two options,’ Trevor continued. ‘One: we can work on the API until we have it reliably integrated into the system.’

‘How long will that take?’

‘There’s no way of knowing,’ said Trevor. ‘Could be a week. Could be a month. Could be longer.’

‘It’s trivial,’ muttered Owen.

‘And the second option?’

‘Drop the API. Use the bog-standard catalogue architecture that comes with the package. True, it’s not as pretty and it’s not as functional. But we will be up and running at the end of the week.’

‘And if we follow option two, are you a hundred per cent sure the system will work this time?’

‘Nothing’s a hundred per cent in this business. But we’ll be using a system that has worked dozens of times before.’

‘I see.’ Guy turned to his brother. ‘Owen?’

‘It’s a second-best solution, man,’ he mumbled.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean you talk about having the best soccer site on the Internet. With my API, we’ll have it. And we’d get it done in, like, a week if these monkeys would just pull their fingers out.’

Trevor pursed his lips. I was impressed with his self-control.

Guy turned to him. ‘Owen says we can do it in a week.’

‘And I say we can’t.’

It was time for me to intervene. Owen was Guy’s weak spot and he could twist himself into knots over this one if I let him.

‘I think the answer’s clear,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes?’ said Guy.

‘Yes. Unless we get the site up in the next week we’ll have a total failure over the Christmas season. It’ll be hard for us to recover our reputation from that. And financially we’ll be strapped. We have to move forward and if that involves making some compromises, we’ve made them in the past.’

‘Amy?’ Guy asked.

‘I like Owen’s application. But I can live without it. And David’s right, we have to shift product. We have no choice.’

‘Ingrid?’

‘We have no choice.’

Guy nodded at the three of us. We were silent. He was dithering. For one usually so decisive, it was obvious he was dithering. Owen’s large bulk was slumped in a chair opposite his brother, staring at him.

‘Trevor, we’ll go with option two,’ I said. ‘Owen, give the Dcomsult people all the help they need.’

Owen looked at his brother. Guy nodded minutely.

‘Let’s get to it,’ I said.

We returned to our desks, Guy subdued. Ingrid brushed past mine. ‘Coffee?’ she whispered, so Guy couldn’t hear.

I followed her out to a coffee shop round the corner. We collected our cappuccinos and sat down.

‘He’s got to go,’ said Ingrid.

I didn’t answer her. I would have loved to get rid of Owen. But it wasn’t that easy.

‘He’s got to go,’ she repeated.

‘I know, but how?’

‘We’ll have to tell Guy.’

‘But he’s Guy’s brother!’

‘Yeah. And Guy should realize that he’s going to cripple the company.’